Whether streaming video or music, or downloading a program or song for later viewing, the trend towards increased content consumption on user devices continues. Such content is frequently received at user devices after being transmitted across a cellular network, straining both radio frequency resources at access networks and core network resources. To manage the demands on these network resources, operators of cellular networks often include content consumption limits in user data plans. These limits are expressed in a data measurement (e.g., a number of gigabytes) for a time period (e.g., a month). For many users, however, it is quite difficult to measure or understand their content consumption against these limits. How much data will streaming that movie consume? Will it matter if the video quality is better or worse? Users without a deep understanding of the underlying technology may struggle to answer such questions. Even users that understand the technology may not know how the content provider selects service quality. Thus, users may have difficulty managing their content consumption.
Also, third party content providers often complicate the issue by automatically defaulting to the highest service quality for the content that they deliver, by making it difficult to find a control for service quality (or not offering one), or by embedding content from other third party content providers within the content that they deliver. In such circumstances, often the only control the user has is whether to consume the content at all; an ability to save resources by reducing service quality is absent.